Oded Leopold Quotes

Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals. ~ Aldo Leopold

To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It wants only to show what actually [essentially?] happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen). ~ Leopold Von Ranke

Music appeals to me for what can be done with it. ~ Leopold Stokowski

In that year [1865] John Muir offered to buy from his brother ... a sanctuary for the wildflowers that had gladdened his youth. His brother declined to part with the land, but he could not suppress the idea: 1865 still stands in Wisconsin history as the birth-year of mercy for things natural, wild, and free. ~ Aldo Leopold

The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers. ~ Aldo Leopold

Spezia offered Leopold almost nothing: his precocity devoured itself there, rejecting the steep sunny coast and nibbling blue edge of the sea that had drowned Shelley. His spirit became crustacean under douches of culture and mild philosophic chat from his Uncle Dee, who was cultured rather than erudite. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

No matter how intently one studies the hundred little dramas of the woods and meadows, one can never learn all the salient facts about any one of them. ~ Aldo Leopold

Currently reading Venus In Furs by Sacher-Masoch,
so... um...

"God did punish him and deliver him into a woman's hands."
Judith 16:7 ~ Bible Notes

O, God assist our side: at least, avoid assisting the enemy and leave the rest to me ~ Aldo Leopold

We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all. ~ Aldo Leopold

Wall Street is a place where the day begins with good buys. ~ Leopold Fechtner

Every man
I know this
turns weak, pliant, ridiculous as soon as he's in love. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all. ~ Aldo Leopold

I can easily imagine belonging to one man for my entire life, but he would have to be a whole man, a man who would dominate me, who would subjugate me by his inate strength. And every man - I know this very well - as soon as he falls in love becomes weak, pliable, ridiculous. He puts himself into the woman's hands, kneels down before her. The only man whom I could love permanently would be he before whom I should have to kneel. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

I've lived near here at several different stretches across time, but once, when I lived here a few hundred years ago, I had a camel I named Oded. He was just about the laziest creature ever to talk the Earth. He would pass out when I was in the middle of feeding him, and making it to the closest Bedouin camp for tea was a minor miracle. But when I first met you in that lifetime-"
"Oded broke into a run," Luce said without thinking. "I screamed because I thought he was going to trample me. You said you'd never seen him move like that."
"Yeah, well," Daniel said. "He liked you."
They paused and looked at each other, and Daniel started laughing when Luce's jaw dropped. "I did it!" she cried out. "It was just there, in my memory, a part of me. Like it happened yesterday. I came to me without thinking!"
It was miraculous. All those memories from all those lives that had been lost each time Lucinda died in Daniel's arms were somehow finding their way back to her, the way Luce always found her way back to Daniel.
No. She was finding her way to them.
It was like a gate had been left open after Luce's quest through the Announcers. Those memories stayed with her, from Moscow to Helston to Egypt. Now more were becoming available.
She had a sudden, keen sense of who she was-and she wasn't just Luce Price from Thunderbolt, Georgia. She was every girl she'd ever been, an amalgamation of experience, mistakes, achievements, and, above all, love.
She wa ~ Lauren Kate

Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf. ~ Aldo Leopold

I do not imply that this philosophy of land was always clear to me. It is rather the end result of a life journey. ~ Aldo Leopold

In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial. ~ Aldo Leopold

What if this were Hell, this absence of sleep, this poet's desert, this pain of living, this dying of not dying, this anguish of shadows, this passion over death and light. ~ Leopold Sedar Senghor

To those who know the speech of hills and rivers straightening a stream is like shipping vagrants - a very successful method of passing trouble from one place to the next. It solves nothing in any collective sense. ~ Aldo Leopold

The civilization of the twentieth century cannot be universal except by being a dynamic synthesis of all the cultural values of all civilizations. It will be monstrous unless it is seasoned with the salt of negri-tude, for it will be without the savor of humanity. ~ Leopold Sedar Senghor

I have always taken care to put an idea or emotion behind my words. I have made it a habit to be suspicious of the mere music of words. ~ Leopold Sedar Senghor

The Congo Free State is unique in its kind. It has nothing to hide and no secrets and is not beholden to anyone except its founder. ~ Leopold II Of Belgium

But one on earth is better than the wife; that is the mother. ~ Leopold Schefer

I take a cruel joy in seeing you tremble and writhe beneath my whip, and in hearing your groans and wails; I want to go on whipping without pity until you beg for mercy, until you lose your senses. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Thinking like a Mountain
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes - something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.…I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea. ~ Aldo Leopold

The Good Lord made all the integers; the rest is man's doing. ~ Leopold Kronecker

Having told the truth for years as a first-rate reporter, Jason Leopold now comes completely clean about himself and also sheds light on his imperiled profession. A riveting account of just how hard the truth can be. ~ Mark Crispin Miller

The sweetest hunts are stolen. To steal a hunt, either go far into the wilderness where no one has been, or else find some undiscovered place under everybody's nose ~ Aldo Leopold

Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a "scenic" area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has "outgrown ~ Aldo Leopold

All results of the profoundest mathematical investigation must ultimately be expressible in the simple form of properties of the integers. ~ Leopold Kronecker

You modern men, you children of reason, cannot begin to appreciate love as pure bliss and divine serenity. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

The ideal which I strive to realize in my life is the serene
sensuousness of the Greeks
pleasure without pain. I do not believe
in the kind of love which is preached by Christianity, by the
moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, look at me, I am worse
than a heretic, I am a pagan. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

My husband's personality was filled with serenity and sunlight. Not even the incurable illness which fell upon him soon after our marriage could long cloud his brow. On the very night of his death he took me in his arms, and during the many months when he lay dying in his wheel chair, he often said jokingly to me: 'Well, have you already picked out a lover?' I blushed with shame. 'Don't deceive me,' he added on one occasion, 'that would seem ugly to me, but pick out an attractive lover, or preferably several. You are a splendid woman, but still half a child, and you need toys. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch